Escape Rooms Bring New Attractions to New Jersey

Guests at Trap Door have one hour to try to make their escape.CreditBryan Anselm for The New York Times

By Tammy La Gorce

Nov. 20, 2015

Eric Rama and Teresa Pulcrano were strangers when they walked into Exit Strategy in Montclair recently. An hour later, when they emerged, Mr. Rama was praising Ms. Pulcrano’s sports trivia knowledge.

“If it wasn’t for her knowing the little bit she did, there’s no way we would have gotten as far,” said Mr. Rama, whose group at the so-called escape room that afternoon had been tasked with answering questions and solving mysteries to escape the office-like structure that had been furnished with props, messages and devices like trap doors

Exit Strategy, which opened in January, is among the escape rooms, or puzzle houses, that have sprouted in New Jersey — not to mention across the country — in recent months.

“No one knows for sure, but I want to say the first one opened in the U.S. in San Francisco maybe three or four years ago,” said Dan Egnor, of Palo Alto, Calif., who runs the website escaperoomdirectory.com. “Since then they’ve been growing exponentially,” Mr. Egnor said, adding that he was seeing around 10 openings a week in the United States.

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The puzzle area and interior room at Trap Door, with a horror theme, which not all room escapes share.CreditBryan Anselm for The New York Times

“Now they’re all over the place,” he said, citing growth in cities like Seattle as well as new entries in places like North Carolina and Tennessee.

The rules, degrees of difficulty and atmospheres of escape rooms vary, but their concept is the same: Bring a cluster of people together, lock them up … and then make it difficult for them to escape.

“You have to work as a team to solve puzzles and challenges so you can get out in less than 60 minutes,” said Howard Klotzkin, a co-owner of Amazing Escape Room, in Freehold, which opened in July.

Escape rooms are an import from Eastern Europe and Asia, said Exit Strategy’s owner, Greg Aschoff, who discovered the concept in Hungary in 2013 and brought home his enthusiasm, along with a new business idea.

“You can only go bowling or to the movies so much,” Mr. Aschoff said. “This is something different, and it’s fun and you can use your brain.”

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Locks and puzzle pieces used at Trap Door, an escape room in Red Bank, N.J.CreditBryan Anselm for The New York Times

Escape rooms are substantially more complicated than, say, scavenger hunts. Before a group enters a room — which can be a single room or multiple rooms that players gain entry to through “Scooby Doo”-type maneuvers like pushing a trick bookshelf — an employee, or “game master,” debriefs them on a mystery they must solve to get themselves out.

For example, hours before arriving at Trap Door Escape Room, which opened in October in Red Bank, a party of three received emails detailing the circumstances behind “Escape the Architect,” the house’s dramatic theme. They were to think of themselves as agents infiltrating a facility run by “the Architect,” a dangerous criminal, and were assigned to recover an item left behind by an agent who had disappeared; recovering the object was key to busting out of the room.

Once in Red Bank, the participants were shown a two-minute video offering more back story on the Architect and the fallen agent. Then they were led to a dim room and locked in.

“One of the things that sets us apart is our level of attention to the story,” said Anthony Purzycki, an owner of Trap Door. Mr. Purzycki and one of his business partners, Frank Giglia, aspired to careers in immersive theater before opening Trap Door. “We’re writers and gamers, and we get the appeal of alt-reality gaming in a real-world setting,” he said.

That is not to say that escape rooms appeal only to gamers and mystery buffs.

“I’m not really a gamer, I just enjoy the experience of trying to figure out the clues,” said Mr. Klotzkin, whose Amazing Escape Room offers five experiences, each with a distinct story line; Trap Door offers one. Exit Strategy’s Montclair location also offers one, but a newer location in Wayne offers three.

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Mike Van Ginneken attempts to solve a puzzle at Trap Door.CreditBryan Anselm for The New York Times

Game masters monitor each group’s progress through rooms via video camera, and sometimes send hints that appear on in-room screens to parties who appear especially stymied or frustrated.

“The majority of people who come here have never been to anything like this, and they have a lot of questions,” Mr. Aschoff said. For example, “people want to know if it’s scary, and it’s not,” he said.

Other escape rooms, like Trap Door, do lean more in the scary direction. There, in early October, a villainous, horror-movie-style voice guided puzzle solvers to a few clues, and a cracked code revealed messages like “Help me, please.”

Age minimums and group-size minimums vary, as does the frequency with which story lines change, so that repeat visitors are not compelled to solve the same mystery multiple times. The success rate of visitors escaping in 60 minutes or less — a length of time that seems to be an industry standard — varies, too. Prices on average are $25 to $35 per person.

Mr. Rama and Ms. Pulcrano, who tried to sleuth their way out of Exit Strategy’s puzzle, were close to solving the mystery. But ultimately they failed.

“We were so close,” said Mr. Rama who, like Ms. Pulcrano, found the difficulty level “just right.”